"The Crimean Spring as an Impetus for the Formation of a New Polycentric World Order"

Another translation from International Affairs

Georgiy Muradov, Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Crimea - Permanent Representative of the Republic of Crimea to the President of the Russian Federation.

Our author, Georgiy Muradov, is a professional diplomat, his bio can be read here. He’s now 70, and has acquired the authority to speak about the myriad interconnected topics he discusses in his essay. He brings some points to light that are often ignored and go undiscussed both in the West and Russia. This will be the final essay from this issue of International Affairs I’ll translate. I hope readers enjoyed the first two.

The Crimean Spring as an Impetus for the Formation of a New Polycentric World Order

Our discussion, colleagues, is very important from the point of view of analysing and forecasting events. In my opinion, the situation is developing very alarmingly. President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov have repeatedly noted that the world is entering an acute phase of confrontation. And if our adversaries continue their policy of pumping Ukraine with new types of weapons, supplying it with intelligence, providing it with finances, instructors and military specialists, this will lead to a dangerous confrontation on the brink of nuclear war.

I will begin with a general assessment that the Crimean Spring, the tenth anniversary of which we are celebrating this year, the reunification of Crimea with Russia, became, as we noted at our forums and earlier, a turning point in the development of the world. This event marked Russia's transition to the phase of gathering the Russian world and restoring its civilisational forces. And the subsequent, albeit long, events related to the upholding of the rights of the Russian people of the Lugansk and Donetsk People's Republics and the start of a special military operation have shown that Russia has firmly embarked on the path of protecting the lives of its compatriots and ensuring its security.

The Crimean Spring was a powerful impetus for the beginning of movement towards a new world order, which is being discussed today not only by us, but also by our potential partners in the formation of a just, equitable and polycentric world of civilisations. We do not yet call them allies, but they are certainly partners in favour of creating structures of the world majority. First of all, this is the BRICS association, which has begun to expand actively, the SCO, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, our allies in the EAEU, and members of the CIS. All these organisations, obviously, will form part of the structure of the World Majority.

But at the same time, I believe that a viable, stable organism should form around these nuclei. And this will be, apparently, a difficult and slow process, although the world has definitely moved along this path. Taking part in numerous forums of BRICS, the SCO, and the EAEU, I can state that many countries are still taking a wait-and-see attitude. If we recall the first votes in the UN in 2014, when Crimea returned to Russia, then most countries abstained or did not take part in the voting on anti-Russian and anti-Crimean resolutions. Until the situation has fundamentally changed, the world majority is still in a passive position on the issue of restoring Russia's civilizational forces.

But there is an obvious positive trend in the creation of new structures. As you know, more than 30 countries have already applied for BRICS membership.

What are our partners waiting for? I believe that first of all, they are waiting for our victory and the achievement of the goals of the special military operation. They expect that we will do this, if not rapidly, but at least quickly. The longer this situation of uncertainty drags on, the more doubts and hesitations arise in them about whether it is worth resisting Western domination. For them, our successes are the main indicator and behavioral stimulus.

After all, it was Russia that initiated the process, spoke in favour of us forming a polycentric world and its structures [Primakov]. A polycentric world means a world of many civilisational centres that have existed on our planet for centuries. And now we are talking about the fact that they should grow into equal, harmoniously cooperating civilisational centres that do not fight or have enmity with each other. Therefore, I prefer to use the term polycentricity. In this polycentric world, difficulties arise that are created for us by our opponents in the person of the dominant Western civilization or, as it is called, the collective West. These are about 30 NATO and EU states, plus their satellites, including in the Pacific region.

After the collapse of the colonial system, the West took strong positions, primarily in the regulation of world trade, world finance, logistics, insurance and other sectors important for world economic relations. And today it is using illegal, criminal measures to destroy them, facing the reluctance of many countries to maintain the system of Western domination. Using their dominant position in international organizations, Washington and Brussels are trying to maintain dollar dependence as the main instrument of coercion by means of forceful illegal pressure.

What is the criminal nature of the West's actions? It is that its so-called secondary sanctions are openly illegitimate and are applied outside the framework of international law and the rules of the World Trade Organisation and UN Security Council resolutions against an increasing number of states. And this, of course, leads to the destruction of world trade and world economic relations as a whole, because Russia, which the West is trying to isolate, accounts for 35-40% of the world's resources. Not only natural and energy, but also forestry, water, land, food and others.

It is simply impossible to "saw" it out of the global economic system without completely destroying it. Such a path undoubtedly leads to a world war. At the same time, the countries that we consider to be the world majority and which are already subject to secondary sanctions have not yet taken a tough and consolidated position with regard to these methods. They, including our closest allies in the Eurasian Economic Union, are trying to comply even with these secondary criminal sanctions. These facts, in my opinion, show that we are still far from the formation of what we call the World Majority and the polycentric world that we are striving for. In the current format, let's face it, this is not yet a polycentric world, it is a continuation of Western domination.

And at the BRICS forums, including the summit in Kazan, it would be important to call for a joint refusal to comply with these imminent restrictions, if we want to ensure the effective functioning of the critical infrastructure of world trade, transport logistics and financial settlements, which is our most important joint task, if we want to move towards a new world, the parameters of which we have outlined. Without this, the process will be extremely long, painful, fraught with the growth of confrontation and the threat of a world conflict, which everyone wants to avoid. Thus, the American doctrine of weakening Russia is, in my opinion, a path to world war.

I believe that in the same way as with the non-recognition of the self-determination of the people of Crimea, the West will act with regard to Taiwan, if tomorrow those forces come to power there that want Taiwan's integration with China. These authorities will not be recognized by either Washington or Brussels, which will declare integration with the PRC illegal. Such a forecast seems to me very likely.

It is true that it is necessary to work consistently with our partners to unite the world majority in order to consolidate our forces and take firm measures against the destructive policy of the West. Crimea is trying to carry out this work at its own level. We hope that soon new regions will join this international activity, seeking with the support of the federal authorities the recognition by the maximum number of countries of Russia's territorial integrity in the form in which it is constitutionally formalized today. And this will be the necessary support of the Russian leadership, which will not retreat from this position in any negotiations. In this regard, I believe that we need to strengthen our joint work with new regions in the field of international and foreign economic activity.

In a similar regard, I would like to note another aspect of the work for the new regions. A number of them are home to significant Ukrainian ethnic communities. Russia, having accepted these regions into its composition, recognized the Ukrainian language as a regional language. That is, in Russia, Ukrainian is now one of the state regional languages. In other words, a significant part of the Little Russian Ukrainians returned to Russia, which gives us the legal right to form a true history and restore the authentic Little Russian language, distorted by forced Westernization.

Russian Ukrainians will have the opportunity to return to their original traditions and values, to their Orthodox faith, which the Nazi Kiev regime tried to take away from them. We missed Ukraine in our time. Now we need to work very seriously with Ukrainianism both in our country and with those who remained outside its borders, including the remnants of Ukraine. We must not distance ourselves from active interaction with the society that remained under the rule of Kiev. It is unacceptable that this land again turns into a stronghold of Western aggression against Russia. Otherwise, we will not solve the problem for many, many years.

I would like to emphasize the importance of forming an objective history of Ukraine. As you know, today Kiev is promoting an anti-Russian version of Ukrainian history. We must solve the problem of its objective interpretation with the participation of our scientists in Crimea and the new subjects of the Russian Federation. The universities of those regions should become the basis for this work. There is a Department of Ukrainian Studies at the Crimean Federal University, which can do this, make new textbooks with the support of the state in order to distribute them in the rest of Ukraine, so that there, after the changes in Kiev, our common understanding of history, the awareness of the unity of our peoples, takes root.

The second is linguistics, that is, the cleansing of the Ukrainian language from Westernization. After all, Westernization is a long-term course specially developed and supported by the West to break up, to blur the closeness of our languages and peoples. Therefore, it should be borne in mind that more than half of Ukraine speaks the so-called South Russian dialect (surzhyk), as well as the literary Russian language. Thus, it is important to linguistically bring the modern Ukrainian language closer to the Russian language, so that there is an understanding that our language, in general, is close, and the majority of Ukrainians, in fact, speak a dialect of the Russian language.

The calm attitude of some Russian politicians to Ukraine's accession to the European Union is alarming. Let me remind you why the coup d'état in Kiev was initiated and what was said in 2014: Ukraine should not join the European Union, because this is a severance of ties with the CIS countries and, above all, Russia. And today joining the organization that has become an integral military-economic part of the NATO bloc, which stamps the allocation of colossal funds for the war against Russia, is even more unacceptable. The economic war launched against our country by the European Union also includes the adoption of numerous packages of criminal sanctions imposed not only against us, but also against third countries.

I am convinced that the opinion about the possibility of Ukraine, Armenia and Serbia joining the European Union is unacceptable to Russia and can cause enormous damage to it. I have no doubt that in the future this will lead to the accession of these countries to the military structure of NATO, and to their involvement in anti-Russian sanctions. An example is Hungary and Slovakia, which, although they do not want to comply with the illegal anti-Russian restrictions prescribed to them, are still forced to do so. Therefore, the attitude towards the accession of new countries to the European Union, in my opinion, is a very serious issue, which should be clearly assessed negatively by the Russian side.

Another difficult problem is the prospect of Turkey's admission to BRICS. BRICS, as you know, has consensus decision-making. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also knows his unequivocal rejection of the reunification of Crimea with Russia. He characterises this event as "Russian aggression" and "occupation".

Thus, if Turkey joins BRICS, it will block the active participation of representatives of Crimea in the regional forums of this association, which has already developed over a number of years.

The second danger is that Turkey is a NATO country. Will we create a precedent for expanding the participation of representatives of this bloc hostile to Russia in the association of non-bloc states, which is BRICS? And what about the fact of Ankara's direct support for Kiev, the supply of weapons to it? It should not be ignored that there are also American military bases in Turkey and nuclear weapons directed against Russia are deployed on its territory. Therefore, in my opinion, it is impossible to treat Turkey's accession to BRICS positively.

In addition, the work of the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) created by Turkey is structured in such a way that objectively undermines the unity of the Russian peoples, including numerous peoples belonging to the Turkic language family, but very far from the Ottoman Turks in traditions, language and partly in religious affiliation. Nevertheless, Ankara is doing everything to spread its influence over them. We have been integrated with these peoples for centuries. We have 12 republics with regional Turkic languages. In most of these republics, Islam is professed, but there are also Orthodox, Buddhist and shamanistic peoples.

All our Turkic peoples use the Cyrillic script, as, incidentally, it was used by the peoples of Central Asia, who were previously part of historical Russia. Turkey, on the other hand, is pursuing a policy of Islamization of the Turkic world and its translation into the Latin alphabet, which, by the way, is alien to the Turkish people and brought from the West. Turkic linguists from the Russian republics have repeatedly substantiated that the phonetic structure of many Turkic languages is more accurately reflected in the Cyrillic alphabet, which is part of the Russian multinational identity.

In addition, Ankara's expansion is reflected in the slogan used against Azerbaijan - "one people - two states". At the same time, we are talking about peoples belonging to different religious movements - Sunnism and Shiism. It is not difficult to predict that soon this slogan will turn into "one people - six states". After all, it is impossible not to take into account that an agreement on the transition of all members of the OTS to the Latin alphabet has already been reached and is documented. And this means the linguistic separation of the peoples of Central Asia from centuries-old ties with Russia, their transition to the Western graphic vector.

Summing up, I would like to emphasize that we have a long way to go ahead of us to defend the place of our Russian civilization in the emerging polycentric world. And in this regard, the significance of the Crimean Spring will continue to grow. The process of restoring our civilizational forces that has begun will objectively continue with the support of new regions of Russia, which should play an important role in this matter. Crimea, for its part, is ready to help in all issues related to international and foreign economic affairs that concern it, based on its considerable experience. [My Emphasis]

I’m very pleased the issue of the OTS was brought forward, as it gets mentioned rarely, and I completely omitted it in my article on Anatolia. I should again mention that Azerbaijan was formed from whole cloth as no such distinct peoples ever existed in that geographic space. And as with Ukraine, the Bolsheviks essentially invented Azerbaijan as a tool to win the Civil War. But that’s a sidenote to what’s being seen as far more important—the organized denunciation of the many illegalities imposed by the Outlaw US Empire and its vassals. Yet, for voices to be raised, they must have the means to avoid the Empire’s punitive actions, which at present are not yet sufficient. IMO, those thinking Turkiye joining BRICS is a good thing need to reassess the great risks involved for Erdogan is utterly unpredictable—measure many times, not just twice, before cutting. Once the West is unable to get its way and the Global Majority prevails, then we can say we’ve entered the Multipolar World Age.

*
*
*
Like what you’ve been reading at Karlof1’s Substack? Then please consider subscribing and choosing to make a monthly/yearly pledge to enable my efforts in this challenging realm. Thank You!